Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume I

RUSSIAN RAILWAYS IN CENTRAL ASIA. BY T. FLETCHER FULLARD, M.A. AN OIL-BURNING LOCOMOTIVE OF THE TYPE USED ON THE TRANS-CASPIAN RAILWAY. {Photo, Locomotive. Publishing Company.^ HE great majority of railways have been built for strictly commercial purposes, while a few owe their existence to the need for the rapid transport of troops to points where they may be of greatest service for protecting or extending the frontiers of an empire. Chief among the latter class are the Trans-Siberian and Trans-Caspian Railways, the second of which forms the main subject of this chapter. If you look at the map of Western Asia, you will observe a continuous thin black line terminating at one end on the shores of the Caspian Sea, at the other on the southern slopes of the Alai the route of way. After inland seas, 1,150 miles wastes punctuated at long intervals by fertile oases. At Merv it throws off a southerly branch to the confines of Afghanistan ; at Khojent a track reaching to Tashkent, a great military to New Marghilan. The sketch map Tagh. This line marks the Trans-Caspian Rail- leaving the greatest of it runs for more than eastward through sandy centre of Central Asia ; at Khokand a small branch appended shows the position of these places, and also of Kizil Arvat, Geok Teppe, Askabad, Chardjui, Bokhara, and Samarcand—historic towns these two last—which the line has put in easy communication with the Caspian. Ever since the middle of the seventeenth century the Russians have sought elbow-room to the east and south-east of their European empire. They felt their way up the Syr Darya to Tashkent, down the Amu Darya to the Khanate of Bokhara. In 1865 they made good their position at Tashkent; but the river route from that town to the Aral Sea, and thence across the steppes to Russia, was long. The day of the railway had arrived ; so M. Ferdinand de Lesseps was invited to draw out plans for an iron track from Orenburg, on the border-line between the two continents, and Tashkent. Russian Pioneers.